Many apologies to Mr. and Ms. Novak for assuming they are a husband and wife team! Sorry not to have done more background research….

In response: Mr. Novak is concerned, in his most recent posting, with drawing some very fine lines. My purpose in writing Moral Minority was rather more basic. It was, very simply, to address a statement that I had heard George W. Bush and various members of his administration make frequently, as though it was a widely acknowledged fact: “This country was founded on Christian principles.” It appeared to me that many if not most Americans believed this to be true (having vague memories of learning about the Pilgrim Fathers in school) and I felt that a very simple and basic introduction to the ideas, statements, and personal philosophies of some of the most famous and influential founders was in order. I also felt that it was important to use the Founders’ own words whenever possible, to let them speak for themselves.

I did not “cherry-pick” my six Founders (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton) in order to make them fit my thesis; I chose them because I felt them to be undoubtedly the six Founders who had had the greatest influence on the legal foundations of this country, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and because they are still the best known and most widely revered of the Founding Fathers. Not every American has heard of John Jay, Benjamin Rush, Charles Carroll and other important Founders, but everyone with even an elementary education has heard of these six.

Before I thought about writing this book or anything like it, I had been reading various popular biographies that have appeared in recent years: McCullough’s John Adams, Ellis’s books on Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin, and I had been struck by how very few Christian dogmas these Founders professed. So when I heard Bush and his colleagues talk disingenuously about our Christian founding, I was taken aback, to put it mildly.

Franklin and Jefferson, Mr. Novak says, “are identified by nearly everybody, including me, as outliers who stand at the leftmost extreme of the founders—outliers, skeptics indeed, barely if at all Christian.” That is absolutely correct; but while Mr. Novak and other historians know this and seem to assume that everyone else does, surprisingly few members of the general public actually do. In fact such things are seldom if ever taught in schools—too incendiary, possibly. I myself attended the University of Virginia, “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” and never heard a single word about his anti-Christianity, despite the Jefferson-worship prevalent on the campus and throughout Charlottesville. My point was simply to let people know Jefferson’s opinions, in his own words. The same is true of Adams.

It is clearly pointless to argue with Mr. Novak about Washington’s beliefs; “the old fox,” as Jefferson called him, was too wily ever to set them down on paper. But I would point out that a stated belief in “Providence” is not by any means the same thing as a stated belief in Jesus Christ.

Mr. Novak says that “Ms. Allen does not really believe that most of the American people at the time of the founding were ‘not Christians.’” Indeed I do not. But I was not writing about the population in general but about these six founders, and the tremendous influence they had upon the Constitution that “We the People” eventually ratified. “We the People,” though being a predominantly Christian population, agreed to ratify this unprecedentedly secular Christian document.

I thought that blogger Jon Rowe, in his response to “Christian Stoics and Skeptical Christians,” made an excellent point. “Let me point something else out—what I think is a non-sequitur—which I’ve noticed folks who argue from Mr. Novak’s side often engage in,” he says. “The argument goes something like this: Analyze a particular phrase uttered from a Founder; find some way in which that phrase traces back to the Bible; and then conclude this warrants placing the Founder in the ‘orthodox / Christian / religious’ box or what have you.” This is absolutely true. All of us have been indelibly stamped by the Bible, whether we are believers or not. This was much more true in the 18th century; the Founders all grew up in an intensely biblical culture. As Rowe points out, even the violently anti-Christian and anti-clerical Thomas Paine made biblical allusions.

Mr. Novak makes an interesting point which I would like to address. He writes: “What accounts for the originality and unique success of the new experiment in religious liberty in the United States is the powerful working of both wings—the wing of ‘common sense’ (the favorite form of ‘Reason’ preferred by the Anglo-American Enlightenment), and the wing of biblical faith.” That might have been true for two hundred years after the founding of the Republic, but it seems to me that the collaboration has now begun to break down; that with a two-party system in which the wing of biblical faith now adheres almost exclusively to one party and the wing of “common sense” to the other, we have reached not only political but cultural deadlock. We are truly two countries.